Cryostasis
by TayteFFN
Summary: Prologue: Friendly Fire. In the era of the Soviet Union, the United States had developed cross-world technology intended as an escape route in case of nuclear warfare. Now crippled by a rampant disease, it sends Agent Amy Johnson into Elibe to secure a refuge for Earth's survivors…by force if necessary. Loosely based on an old fanfiction.


**I've always wanted to invade Elibe.**

* * *

**Cryostasis**

**~Prologue: Friendly Fire~**

_I knew I could call it an accident._

* * *

They will remember that electric moment better than I. That moment when all began to converge, and we each learned for ourselves that fear breaks people as often as it brings them together, and this was a time it broke us. I have it written almost frame by frame in my journal, so I've made it all too easy for me to simply jot it down just the same. The immediately apparent: the wideness of the sky in that flat, Sacaen plain, the humming of the wild wind that slapped Lyn's hair into my face, the two knights curiously standing a ways away, as we came to observe a manmade artifact from a foreign place.

It was a tank, and I knew it, with more and more about it coming back to me as I ran my hands over the armored skirt that topped the track. I promptly climbed onto the turret ring to join Lyn, who was examining the top hatch next to the machine gun. How long ago had this one been abandoned here? How many more are there? I wondered, giving out a shout when I saw Sain's horse sticking his nose into the main gun's barrel. The destrier apparently didn't like what it found there anyway and began to lip at the driver's hatch instead, through which the driver, commander and loader of a tank team would squeeze into the space of one vending machine on its side. The gunner would join them too. Not a happy place for four army-built men, but the top of the line M1A1 was the best firepower the US had in terms of tanks, defeated only through friendly fire and self-destruction to prevent its falling into enemy hands. I say "was" not because the US found something better, but rather because I wasn't so sure how the United States was holding up back then.

But that's later.

"Ready?" Lyn said.

I nodded, and we both set to work turning the top of the hatch. We could have decided not to. We could have decided to leave it alone and come back in the night after ditching the knights. But I had forgotten the need to keep it secret, our Earthen technology, and the ways of our war machines. I had forgotten a lot of things. There had been no Contact waiting to greet me and remind me where I was, what I was doing here – _who_ I was, because any time we Crossed Over in one way or another, Earth to Elibe, Elibe to Earth, we always forget.

Well, it didn't matter anyways. Whether the knights were there or not didn't matter, because either way, they didn't help in the struggle that was coming. You can't blame them; they didn't know how. And I didn't remember that I might need their help.

This hatch was harder to open than on the last tank Lyn and I had found in the plains – the first tank we had found, when it was just the two of us alone and we weren't running from the Djute Clan. But it gave purchase when Kent saw what we were trying to do and took a hold of my latch and turned, and the two flaps of the hatch opened to a small, dark hole not even a foot and a half across. This was what soldiers had to squeeze through to get into the tank.

"What is it?" he asked, as Lyn and I sat haunch-legged, peering in. The last one still had lights flickering, so we were able to drop in without fear of landing on the breach and killing our knee or something, but this one required careful clambering in if we wanted the loot of the place. Our collection of loot so far included pieces of a solar-powered pistol (the Djute clan had taken the other bits and pieces as trophies…along with the soldiers…), a flash light, a wallet, and a pack of cigarettes that I tried to smoke. (It's disgusting; please don't do it.)

I looked back at Kent's destrier, which was happily munching away, and then located Sain's. It was now lipping at the five sets of road wheels of the tank. That's when I knew.

The tank was not abandoned. That weird breathing noise was not the horses.

It rose, blinking, out of the darkness and we all sprang out of the way, instantly repulsed, Lyn stumbling and falling onto the destrier, Kent smoothly landing on the grasses with a blade already out, and me? I did an accidental roll backward off the turret ring and landed on my ankle on my merry way down.

The thing had already been rotting before, the skin of the soldier's carcass a layer peeling off from cheek along the bottom lining of its jaw. The color of its complexion was some dirty off-white spotted with cakes of blood around the rim of its teeth. There were no more lips to speak of, but a hole in its neck I could see sky through. It came clambering with fingers long, and a wheezing, whistling sound that accompanied no voice, for the air that gushed down its throat escaped back out through the hole. That wheezing, whistling sound trumped the calls, the alarms, of everybody there. We did not we heard each other, Lyn, Sain, Kent and I. In that moment of panic, there were not one. It was always _me _and this_ monster_, this monster with the sunken face and the eye-engulfing cataracts.

I was screaming, I was weeping, I was crawling on my back, my elbows sinking in the prickly grass as I pushed away, away with my uninjured left leg. My hands were fumbling in the spaces of my cloak, and it was useless, useless, useless that Kent had sliced away one arm so that it tumbled down the back of the tank after me. And then came the blinding sun off the arc of Lyn's blade and the resounding _Clang! _of metal hitting metal, and then the soldier was in the grass, the top half of its body was, at least, with one arm reaching into the earth and dragging forth its torso, leaving behind it like the slime of a slug the catching entrails of its digestive tracts. It stopped him for a while, that one intestinal worm that spread down from the cape of the tank, the only thing connecting the two halves of the body. And towering behind him was Sain, dueling with another such monstrosity that had risen out of the tank.

It was a spectacular sight: with the sun between them, the knight and his opponent were reduced to stark, black silhouettes marking the ongoing struggle between the living and the dead. I did not intend to bring it into this realm, this struggle that had eaten my world inside out and destroyed our civilization – for with globalization Earth's people had truly become one.

But now the knight had his sword clean through the heart and it came to me that if the undead soldier merely turned its head now, it could sink its teeth into the sword hand, and then Sain too would be an enemy. Will be an enemy. Is an enemy.

I had found the pistol by now. I had trained the pistol by now, cocked it and heard the sound like a death knell over that whistling that was still growing louder, stronger. The first shot went between the eyes of the hungered monster crawling to my feet. I didn't see it grow still; I had already trained it on my second target. The undead Sain stuck through the heart had pulled him into a deadly embrace. A black and white struggle without lines to blur between knight and the undead. In that moment I knew I could claim it a mistake. I knew I could call it an accident. In that brink of panic, who could blame the offset of six inches if you could not tell one adversary from the next? In my mind it was too late; already both were enemies of mine.

So I set my mark and I pulled the trigger. Because it happened so many times before. Because it happened again and again. Because the one time I didn't stop it, was the time it was my brother and father, and I was a second too late in firing.

And I saw the irony when I fired again. That the M1A1 has only ever lost to friendly fire.


End file.
